Petaluma
by Erik's Champion
Summary: Modern day high school AU. Pegasus reflects on how he came to know Cecelia, and how he lost her.


We made cards for you in English. It was the kind of thing we hadn't done as a class since we were all in grade school and our teacher had spent the morning teaching us how to make Valentines. I was sorely tempted to sprinkle glitter and glue pink lace along the edges of mine, but I didn't. That would be in bad taste, I thought.

After school we walked over to your house. Your mother welcomed us in with a beautiful smile, patted our shoulders, and sat us down in a neat row on the edge of the sofa. She stood outside your bedroom door, knocking lightly, calling your name. She turned her face away so that we couldn't see her, and when she looked back at us she was smiling again.

You did your best to keep a regular school schedule. You had doctor's appointments on Tuesday mornings and you always tried to enter class as quietly as you could when you came back - fingers digging into the straps of your backpack, teetering on the tips of your toes and closing the door behind you one centimeter at a time. But everyone still stared. They were always staring at you. You couldn't raise your hand or speak in class without everyone stopping just to look at you, as if stunned that you were still there.

I sat beside you in the corner of the gym when you had to stop your catch your breath. You sat with your knees pinched together and feet splayed far apart, watching the rest of the class run laps. Your hand was on your chest and it rose and fell so quickly; I could almost see your heart beating through your shirt. Your face was beginning to change, even then. Your eyes were getting bigger. I could see the veins bulging around your temples. They were a lovely shade of blue - I called it summer twilight.

I brought you your homework assignments. You had spent the week at a hospital in the city, and it had rained every night. But you had slept straight through the wind and rain raging outside your window, playing the trees like windchimes. On the car ride back home you had seen the rows of lopsided utility poles, trees that had bowed over and were still straining to pick up their missing limbs. We had been without rain for so long now that the earth didn't know what to do with its own water. It sat in huge silver puddles in the middle of the fields, it gathered dirt and leaves and clogged all the gutters, it seeped in through the bottom of our shoes and squished between our toes with every step we took.

I hadn't wanted to come back to your house, but I had been saving extra copies of every worksheet all week. I had even kept my notes exquisitely neat so that you could read them. Your mother thanked me three times and I nodded and smiled and wasn't entirely sure what to say. "You're welcome" didn't feel appropriate, "no problem" would have been a lie.

You had cut your hair right after you came back from the hospital. You had done it furtively, in the bathroom, before your mother could come in and take the scissors away. The cut was severe and uneven in the back; it left your neck and shoulders looking large and vulnerable. I probably couldn't help but stare, and you probably couldn't help but notice. After you had laid your homework out on your desk and organized your books you pressed the scissors into my hand and asked me, quietly, if I could try to fix it for you. So you stood looking out your bedroom window while I floated around your shoulders, making my cuts as small and unobtrusive as possible, not quite believing that this didn't hurt. When I finished you tossed your head from side to side, saying that it felt much lighter now.

Your bedroom window looked out over your backyard, which was swept up by the hillside and swallowed by the trees.

"Sometimes I can see deer out there in the morning," you told me. "And the evenings. They like the dim hours. My mom is always telling me that it's a bad sign when they come in this close to people because it means that they're looking for food and water, and if the deer are hungry then that means the mountain lions are hungry, too." You shrugged. "But I still like to see them."

When you were looking out the window I was watching your reflection trapped inside it. She was pearlescent and bright, her face painted across the landscape - touching everything from the dark damp soil to the thick gray clouds.

We stood together looking out the window and waiting for the deer to come out, but they never did. I suppose the four o'clock rain must have kept them cloistered in the hills.

At home that night I found clippings of your hair in the wrinkles of my shirt.

I unwittingly became the quintessential adolescent suitor - offering to carry your books home for you. The first time I offered you laughed and it sounded like the first few brave flowers that were just then daring to bloom. The second time you looked like you might cry and you didn't make any sound at all. But you always let me walk with you, and your mother never scolded me when I accidentally tracked mud across your carpet.

You had maps tacked to your bedroom walls: Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq.

"It's the birthplace of civilization," you explained when you noticed me looking. "Everything that makes what we think of as civilization possible - it came from there. Cities, agriculture, most of the world's religious traditions. The entire world would be completely different if it wasn't for the things that were created there."

You told me a story:

"In ancient Egypt, when a pharaoh died they used to bury him with a lot of really valuable things - gold, food, stuff like that. But after a while, the burial practices began to change. People stopped burying the pharaoh with the physical objects themselves and just carved representations of the objects on the walls of the tomb. People think that the practice changed because it cost them too much to keep putting all their wealth underground. They could only have so much gold and they kept burying a ton of it whenever a pharaoh died - effectively taking a lot of their wealth out of circulation. It was making them go bankrupt." You paused. Your face was pale, damp, and shimmering, your lips thin and dry. I blinked, for a moment mistaking you for your own reflection in the glass. "I always thought it was funny imagining how that must have played out. Did you think they all just got together one day like, 'Look, guys, we have to cut back on the amount of stuff we bury the pharaoh with. We're running out of money!' I wonder if the first people who just drew the pictures felt bad about it, like maybe they weren't giving him enough. Maybe they thought they were being selfish…"

We continued sitting side by side at your desk, just close enough for our elbows and our knees to brush. For nearly an hour you never opened your mouth or turned towards me, never spared even the slightest indication that you knew that I was there. You didn't pick up your pen or turn a page in your textbook. As you sat there so still and silent I wondered if you trying to teach me, to show me what it feels like to be completely gone.

Standing on your doorstep later, opening my umbrella, I wondered if, perhaps, you had been trying to teach yourself as well.

The rain didn't stop. All the grass that we had stopped watering during the summer and into the fall pulled itself up and stood proud and lush and green again. We learned to listen for the flood advisory, for falling tree branches, for sidewalks about to crumble under our feet. We counted the ants crawling along your windowsill. We picked up the worms that were stranded on the pavement and watched them squirm back into the dirt. We stopped expecting our hair to dry completely. And we grew accustomed to the constant pounding on our roofs and on our umbrellas and on the tops of our heads - so much so, in fact - that if the night was too still we would pace and pace and tap our fingers or our feet. And you didn't come to school anymore.

I tried to bring you books and DVDs instead of homework assignments. You lined them up on the floor along the edge of your bed and looked at the covers. You asked me to tell you what they were about, and you leaned your head against my shoulder while I tried to explain. I can't recall a single word of it, but I chose something to watch that I thought would make you laugh. So we spent the afternoons sitting side-by-side on your bed watching cartoons on your computer, sharing one set of earbuds and turning up the volume whenever we could hear your parents starting to yell and slam the cabinet doors.

Your father had turned your bed so that you could still see out the window, and I watched you watch the little black birds darting across the sky. I admired the sweet, fearless curve of your nose and thought that it reminded of a candied cherry on ice cream. But the resemblance was not in the color, nor even in the shape of any of your features - rather it was the idea. The idea of a candied cherry on ice cream, the idea that even already wonderful things can be made even more wonderful.

I was not quite fully asleep, just warm and somewhat outside myself, when you nudged me awake. "Let's go outside."

"But isn't it cold out?"

You shook your head.

"It's been raining."

"It's not now." You turned the volume down low so we could listen to the silence. The rain had stopped. "Let's go!"

We crept down the hall and out the back door, then stood for a moment at the very edge of the house. I looked down at your bare feet, so white they seemed to glow in the warm amber light that was pouring out the windows. I asked you if you shouldn't put something on to keep warm, but I think you chose to pretend that you hadn't heard me. You looked out over the lawn and stepped into the grass, each footstep sticky with mud that oozed out from under you. I rolled up my pant legs and followed you. You moved quickly into the trees and I almost lost you in the shadows. At first I thought you were trying to run from me, but no, of course that wasn't it at all. You were trying to be found.

And I did. I found you half-way up the hill, staring into your bedroom window. We had left the light on and the video playing - we could see the light flickering against the walls. It almost looked like we had kept a fire burning. We stood like that for a moment, and then you began to speak.

"It's stupid, but I really kept thinking that you were going to ask me to prom last year. I kept waiting...thinking that one day you'd just turn up at my locker...ask me!"

I gawked. I had no idea what to say. "I'm sorry...I had no idea…"

"You mean it _wasn't_ painfully obvious that I've had a crush on you for...I don't even remember how long ago it started...Well, maybe it's for the best that you never noticed."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." You turned to me and smiled. "Really. I'm just…" You turned away and sighed. Your voice grew quiet. "I'm just feeling sorry for myself."

You swayed a little back and forth on the balls of your feet and pulled the sleeves of your sweatshirt over your hands, then bunched the loose ends into tight little balls.

"That's okay."

You tilted your head back to grin at the stars. You crossed your arms over your chest, but it wasn't a tight cross - you were too thin to hold yourself tightly. "It's not." You laughed a little. "Everyone else feels sorry for me." Then you turned away and pretended to scratch your nose. You laughed again and the laughter bubbled through your voice until it popped. "I'm supposed to be... _serene_ and _inspiring_ and just pretend that I don't notice any of this and how horrible it is!" You flung your arms out. "I'm supposed to be grateful that I even got a chance at all! But-I'm not. I'm not! I-"

I didn't know what to do. Your mouth was trembling and I acted without thinking. I started pulling your family's flowers, snapping their soft green stems at the neck. I wanted to pick them all. But I stopped, I held my fistful of flowers up to your face, and mumbled, "I could take you now…"

"What?"

I took a step closer and picked one flower from the bunch. "I'm a year late, but I'll take you now, if you want." You didn't say anything. I asked you to give me your hand, and you did, and I tried to bow like a true gentleman as I tied the flower around your wrist.

You took another

and tucked it down my shirt. Then

it began to pour.

The raindrops bounced off our shoulders and ran down our noses and our chins. We squinted a little to keep it out of our eyes and, hardly able to see, we stumbled closer together. I don't think I'd ever felt so thoroughly wet.

At first we couldn't hear your parents calling your name - the rain masked their cries. They kept screaming. You buried your face against me and told me again and again that you didn't want to go back inside and that you didn't want to die. They screamed louder.

When we stumbled back inside your father grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the into corner of the room.

"Why did you let her do that?!" He towered over me, his face was the largest thing that I had ever seen, and he did not want to let me go. But all I could hear was your voice, wailing over and over: " _What difference does it make?!_ "

He sent me home. It had stopped raining by the time I began my walk back. I was at the corner of Marina and Zinfandel when, walking by the empty lot, I felt that I had stepped into a pocket of silence that was sweeter and more poignant than any that a normal street could tend. I held my breath and stood incredibly still. After a moment, it revealed itself to me - the shadows moving across the grass resolved into the shape of a small deer. She had such large eyes, such an open face. I think she noticed me before I noticed her, and she quickly kicked up her heels and darted away. Watching that creature move, I had never felt so ungainly on my feet, never so uncertain about where I was going. Had been she been afraid?

I knew what your mother was calling to tell me by the second ring of the telephone.

They cleaned out your locker and we wrote you love notes on your Facebook wall. I used to scroll through it after dark, when the screen was so bright white it made my eyes sting until I couldn't see anything anymore. Everyone said that you had moved on to a better place, and I found myself wondering if that was really true. I looked at your face in your picture - you were glowing like the sunset, like those surprising little spring flowers that popped out of the earth when it finally started raining then carpeted everyone's lawns. Everything in your face, from the starlight sparkles in your eyes to the small brown freckles that dotted your nose, looked like it had been ready to live forever.

Once, sitting at the foot of your bed, I had asked if I could draw your picture. You were hardly bigger than the wrinkles in your blanket. You had shook your head, and said, voice barely audible. "Not like this."

It's truly a wonder that any of us manage to survive anything at all.

Sometimes I will forget that I miss you. The clouds part, just barely. But then the feeling comes rushing back, unbidden and invincible, like missing the final step of a flight of stairs and rushing into the floor too soon. And I'll find myself on my knees, breathless, and starving. Then I'll sit and watch the sky change - from black to blue and back again - and feel nothing at all.

I hate the world. This whole time I've only been loving you.


End file.
